Cue the Music, MacGyver is Back!

While most companies are mining 80′s toy franchises for comic titles (He-Man, GI Joe, Battle Beasts, Transformers, etc.) Image is headed to television. Image announced over the weekend that they will publish the first new MacGyver story in twenty years!

He can save the day with nothing more than a paperclip and a chocolate bar, but how will he fare with ink and staples? Yes, MacGyver is back —in a fast-paced comic book mini-series co-written by his creator, Lee David Zlotoff and published by Image Comics. The first MacGyver story since the television show ended in 1992 kicks off on October 10 with the first issue of MACGYVER: FUGITIVE GAUNTLET.

The series, co-written by Tony Lee (Doctor Who, Hope Falls) and drawn by Will Sliney (Farscape), with covers by Andie Tong (Superman, TRON), picks up Mac’s story as he gets tangled in a web of industrial espionage and murder. On the run across the globe, Mac has to escape his pursuers—which won’t be easy with a million-dollar bounty on his head!

“I’ve been a fan of the TV show since I was a kid, and whenever I was asked what my dream project would be at conventions, only one name ever came up,” said Tony Lee. Some discussions and a meeting with his manager later, Lee was Skyping with MacGyver creator Zlotoff.

The more he thought about the medium of comics, the more the idea appealed to him, Zlotoff explained. “In the last decade or so, the graphic novel and comics arena has simply exploded in terms of both the kinds of stories that are being told and the range of artistic styles now being explored. So as I considered the constant call from fans around the world to bring MacGyver back, it struck me that the simplicity and directness of comics might be the perfect place to start.”

The result? A five-issue mini-series that ups the ante for the eponymous hero, taking him to far-off places and embroiling him in trouble that only MacGyver could escape.

“The biggest issue the TV show had was budget, and comics don’t have that problem,” said Tony Lee. “We have MacGyver traveling to African jungles, Cairo, even Moscow in a globe-trotting adventure that—short of a big budget feature film—could never have been done before in such scale and scope.”

In addition to a story full of thrills and twists, MACGYVER will contain the history of the television show’s creation in the issues’ backmatter, written by MACGYVER creator Lee David Zlotoff.